Dreams and Mirrors

"I, who have felt the horror of mirrors
Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal
Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable,

An impossible space of reflections,

But of gazing even on water that mimics

The other blue in its depth of sky,

That at times gleams back the illusory flight

Of the inverted bird, or that ripples,

And in front of the silent surface

Of subtle ebony whose polish shows

Like a repeating dream the white

Of something marble or something rose,

Today at the tip of so many and perplexing

Wandering ears under the varying moon,

I ask myself what whim of fate
Made me so fearful of a glancing mirror.

...

It is strange to dream, and to have mirrors

Where the commonplace, worn-out repertory

Of every day may include the illusory

Profound globe that reflections scheme.

God (I keep thinking) has taken pains

To design that ungraspable architecture

Reared by every dawn from the gleam

Of a mirror, by darkness from a dream.

God has created nighttime, which he arms

With dreams, and mirrors, to make clear

To man he is a reflection and a mere

Vanity. Therefore these alarms."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
“Mirrors,” in Dreamtigers

Subjective Wholes

"As we analyze a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. We divided the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of the mind, according to the teaching of psychology, into component factors: but we know very well that judgement and knowledge, courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary coefficients, of a most complex integral."

- D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860 - 1948)
On Growth and Form

Relation Between Observer and Thing

"The real world gives the subset of what is; the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer. The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The “constraint” is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer. It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsic to the thing but are relational between the observer and thing."

- W. Ross Ashby (1903 - 1972)

Things Are What They Are

"Please remember: things are not what they seem."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )

"Things are not as they seem.
They are what they are."

- Terry Pratchett (1948 - 2015) 

"But one needs to bear in mind
that things are not always what they seem and,
contrary to the dead stillness of a photograph,
reality is in a state of perpetual flux."

- Audur Ava Olafsdottir (1958 - )  

New Eyes

"A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

...

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new sights,
but in looking with new eyes

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Remembrance of Things Past